I had used 3DS Max prior to my university career, and was familiar with the Brazil Renderer, which often produced an almost ‘clay-like’ feel to the objects it rendered, with very soft shadows with mostly default settings.  The renders were extremely quick and the quality significantly above that of the default renderer.

Rendered using Brazil Renderer

As a result I found these types of images extremely useful for Work in Progress (WIP) images of concept renderings.  It helped to convey the fact the objects were still being sculpted or molded and were not yet final, but were also at a stage where form is being thoroughly considered.  However, I never invested the amount of time required in order to get top shelf results with final WOW shots and as less and less of my 3D modeling was being done in 3DS Max (and more and more in Solidworks) I had to shift my focus to another rendering engine.

What I came across from a friend’s recommendation was the Maxwell Render Engine.  When I first visited the website and viewed the gallery of images, I was blown away by the quality, but was skeptical of how much effort it would require, or how much experience in order to get it to look ‘just right’.  I quickly downloaded the trial and found that it wasn’t so much a crazy learning curve, but rather the program required a significant amount of time in order to reach those high levels of photo-realistic quality.  I quickly realized that this program would not be very efficient for concept renderings, as render times could often reach 10+ hours for a single (depending on material choices and lighting) scene.  However, it did force me to begin working more efficiently as I needed to have finalized concepts to be rendered several days in advance to take advantage of the quality Maxwell affords.

I was then introduced to BunkSpeed’s Hypershot which seemed to bridge the gap between quality and quickly at the sacrifice of some control.  It is a very, very easy to use render engine that lacks the total control of Maxwell, but makes up for it with great speed of rendering, which fit into the hole that had developed for concept renderings.

As technology has developed and gone further and further, it is now at the point where these render engines can be used almost interchangeably.  I can now use Maxwell to render concept images at medium resolution in minutes (depending on the scene), or use Hypershot to do final images at high resolution in less than an hour.  The processing power and amount of RAM that computers are being packaged with currently means that now the longest part of the process is either modeling or creating the scene with which to show the highlighted product.  Streamlining the scene creation, or utilizing scenes that have already been used in the past can help afford extra time to tweaking the model and getting it just right.

Scene Quickly Made in Maxwell Render

Often times I have products that look best in context so I try to keep multiple scenes backed up and ready for usage.  I have a table setting scene, that I used to highlight some business cards (they were on my mind after my last post) I modeled for the sake of this entry and render in Maxwell.  It was simply a matter of opening the existing file with the plate, table and glass all correctly placed with proper materials mapped, and then import the business cards and place them on the table.  It is vitally important to analyze one’s workflow when using programs that demand large amounts of time.  Shaving minutes off any part of the process can be significant and a cause for celebration.  Using Maxwell Render to create these images offsets the initial timesink for rendering by allowing the user to adjust lighting on the fly after the image has been stopped rendering.  Thus you can create night scenes and day scenes from the same render with almost no additional time added.  That can be incredibly beneficial if a product has lights or glows, or there is some significance to showing it in both settings, or it can be entirely useless.  If it is useless, then it is important to recognize that and perhaps switch applications to one such as Hypershot, which will get the job done quicker and in a quality that is sufficient.

When working with 3D Rendering programs, there is nothing more important (besides the power of your computer hardware perhaps) than maintaining an efficient workflow, and yet, it is one thing that is rarely addressed.  It is unfortunate as it contributes to the low quality of renderings that are in no short supply.  It requires working on a much more strict schedule than normal, which while difficult for most designers, would probably result in an overall better presentation of product, and sometimes, its the sizzle that sells the steak.